What Belongs to You : A Novel (Hardcover)

from rgustafson

Hauntingly beautiful prose. On the surface this novel appears very different from Crow Lake and My Name is Lucy Barton, the most recent novels I've read. However, it's ultimately about understanding your own heart, your own story. It's also another novel of the family secrets that permeate the li...

from Dreesie

This novel is claustrophobic, making the reader feel as trapped as the main character (MC; an unnamed gay American teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria) so often does. Outside it is cold and inhospitable, inside it is hot and stuffy. The author's ability to portray that feeling--of feeling trapped and lig...

from richardderus

Rating: 4* of five The Publisher Says: On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months...

from Bostonseanachie

This carefully crafted small novel arises from the chance encounter of an expat American with a charming hustler in a public restroom in Bulgaria. It examines the ridiculousness of any desire and the mortification of unrequited desire in particular, and the narrator's limited Bulgarian language s...

from Laura400

I'm sure the rapturous reviews made my expectations for this too high, but that was the context in which I read this, and in that context, I thought it was good. I'm not sure I thought it lived up to the hype, exactly. But it's good. It's oddly constructed, in that the novel has different parts t...